A key element of the responsible use and stewardship of refrigerants is the recovery, recycling and reclamation of used refrigerants so that they can be reprocessed for further commercial use or destroyed. It has become standard practice in the refrigeration system service industry to recover and reclaim refrigerant for later reuse, rather than merely to vent such refrigerant into the atmosphere, as had been common practice in the past. Refrigerants can be recovered, recycled and reclaimed from many systems, such as mobile air conditioners, stationary air conditioners and refrigeration systems, for example. The recovered refrigerant is then transported to a facility for reclamation.
The reclamation process typically encompasses an initial chemical analysis of a sample of the recovered refrigerant in an effort to identify the composition of the recovered refrigerant that is to be reclaimed. The following steps are commonly performed to prepare the refrigerant sample for analysis: (1) drawing a sample of liquid refrigerant, (2) injecting the sample into a sample bomb, (3) vaporizing the sample in the bomb, (4) filtering the vaporized sample to remove contaminants, such as lubricants, water and metallic particles, and (5) manually introducing the filtered sample into an analytical instrument for analysis, such as mass spectroscopy and gas chromatography. Contaminants, such as oil or other lubricants are filtered from the vaporized sample in step 4 because those contaminants could impair the chromatography process.
The foregoing preparation steps are time consuming, typically consuming 90 minutes or more, and, for that reason, only a small fraction of recovered refrigerant may be analyzed. In order to comply with ever-increasing regulatory demands it has become necessary to conduct a more comprehensive analysis of the recovered refrigerant that is to be reclaimed. Such regulatory demands are defined in Air-conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI) Standard No. 700-2006. Thus, there is a need in the industry for a refrigerant sample preparation system that can be employed to more rapidly prepare recovered refrigerant for analysis.